Apocalypse - Keith R. A. DeCandido [62]
It was maddening.
More maddening was that he had passed on the condition to his daughter.
The T-virus was going to be his greatest creation. Yes, it would be used for a wrinkle cream, as much so it could be a test case as anything, a practical application to a wide range of people with minimal consequences if it failed.
But it was also the key to a cure for so many diseases.
Especially the one suffered by both Ashford and his daughter.
Angie would get to lead a normal life.
Or, at least, that was what he had thought.
Ashford knew something was wrong when they moved the T-virus research down to the Hive—and cut him out of it. Instead, they put those two sex-crazed young people, Mariano Rodriguez and Anna Bolt, in charge. Decent scientists, both of them, with promising futures, but they were young and impulsive.
And, Ashford soon realized, much easier to manipulate.
Now it had all gone to hell.
In fact, it had gone to the ninth circle of hell, and there wasn’t a damn thing Charles Ashford could do about it.
The only thing he could do was save his daughter. That had become his sole goal. He knew he couldn’t do anything to stop Cain and his gun-toting goons from making a bad situation worse in Raccoon City. Ashford was well enough protected by his connections to Umbrella’s board of directors—another recipient of the tattered remains of his soul—to keep Cain more or less off his back, but that protection certainly didn’t allow him to take Cain on.
A lifetime of being forced to sit meant that Ashford spent a great deal of time in front of a computer. Though he wouldn’t call himself a class-A hacker by any means, he knew his way around the machines well enough that, given his high-level access to Umbrella’s mainframe, he could navigate around the system with impunity. That often involved tying his laptop in to the Umbrella-built cameras located all over the city, ostensibly for the police department’s use. Ashford knew that Umbrella used them for whatever suited its purposes at any given time.
Right now, Ashford was using them to rescue his daughter.
Mobile phone service was being jammed by Cain, but he couldn’t affect the land lines belonging to Verizon. Ashford had been able to tie his own satellite phone—a perk of his position—into the pay-phone network throughout the city.
He knew that, even in so obscene a postapocalyptic scenario as that playing out in Raccoon City, there would be survivors—those hardy enough to endure under even the worst of circumstances. He had found several in Alice Abernathy and Carlos Olivera, both members of Umbrella’s Security Division, as well as Officer Jill Valentine of the police department’s S.T.A.R.S. unit. In truth, Valentine was the only one he trusted, but he knew they were all motivated by a desire to survive. Umbrella had abandoned all of them to their deaths. Ashford was throwing them a lifeline.
They weren’t likely to give that up.
To his irritation, there were no cameras in the school proper that he could tap, so he was forced to maintain a vigil on the traffic camera at the corner of Hudson and Robertson.
Eventually, after an interminable wait, he saw Officer Valentine, Abernathy, and Olivera emerge, plus that black fellow who was tagging along—
—and Angie! They’d done it!
“Thank God,” Ashford muttered to himself.
He noticed that neither the television reporter nor Sokolov came out. That was a tragedy, true—though, from what Ashford had seen on the morning news, the loss of Terri Morales was not one that would be widely mourned by any rational television viewer—but given the events of this day, they would have died ’ere long, as the Bard would say. All Ashford cared about was getting his daughter back.
After tapping several keys that linked his phone to the pay phone near the playground behind the school, Ashford dialed it.
He watched on the monitor as Abernathy and the others reacted to it.
As soon as Abernathy picked up the phone, Ashford said, “Let me speak to my daughter.”
“First you tell us how we